The present application describes systems and techniques relating to documentation and reporting systems for use with diagnostic medical imaging procedures.
Traditional documentation processes for diagnostic imaging procedures have included both computerized and manual reporting solutions and generally involve an inventory type process, where each item considered during the procedure is documented in turn, like checking off items on an inventory list. Traditional computerized reporting solutions have used drop down lists, radio buttons, fill in the blanks, and scroll bars as part of their interface, but still represented a documentation by inventory approach. Such solutions typically offered many questions on many pages that users needed to organize and track in their own heads, thus full documentation of an exam (such as to meet regulatory requirements) was performed after the exam was completed, and the examiner was no longer conducting the exam. Since medical imaging equipment is often expensive and its use in high demand, traditional exam documentation and reporting solutions where often too time consuming to be used during the actual exam (i.e., prior solutions were geared towards doing an exam, reviewing the exam and then documenting the report).
Many off-line computerized solutions try to optimize the user interface by defining each type of exam and dedicating a unique user interface for each exam type. In many cases, the user interface pages contain specified headings requiring the user to go to a specific section to answer a question. Users were often required to keep track of where they have been and what they have done in the user interface by jumping around to each page they have visited. Moreover, many times the only way the user is able to track exactly what has been documented is to first generate, and then look at, the final report.
Many ultrasound scanners also provide an on-board documentation system. These systems typically incorporate a multi-page user interface or a scrollable user interface. When specific exam protocols were addressed in such on-board documentation systems, this was typically handled by developing several user interface pages to handle each and every unique protocol separately.